About

Lightcase | Pop up Photo Studio for Smartphones

£33,732

pledged of £12,000 goal

1,371

backers

Hooray! The Lightcase has been FUNDED! You can now order your Lightcase direct from our website www.lightcase.co.uk/buy/

We are Dominic Crinson and Brenna Jensen and we have designed the Lightcase to help you take great photos of small things using your smartphone. We both run our own creative businesses designing, making, marketing and selling. Time is precious when you are wearing all the hats. So we needed a quick and easy way to photograph our products to help us sell and promote our work online. All you need is the Lightcase, a smartphone/camera and some natural light and you can get professional looking photos of your work in an instant.

Lightcase is basically a mini photographic studio that gives you a quick, affordable and low-tech way to get clear, sharp and well lit photos. We designed it especially for creatives selling in the various online marketplaces such as Etsy, Folksy, DaWanda, Made it, Zibbet, Ebay... but it's also a great tool for bloggers and for social marketing on sites like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr and just about anywhere you need great photos of what you do.

Setting up the Lightcase is easy! Light diffuses through the frosted polypropylene so you don't need lighting equipment

How to use the Lightcase

The instructions are simple:

Set up the Lightcase by popping and clicking it into shape

Place near a source of natural light

Choose your background: frosted, white or black

Position object and smart phone (or camera)
Zoom to frame and shoot

Lightcase takes seconds to set up and will help you take amazing photos without the hassle of big shot camera equipment, professional lighting, makeshift backgrounds, tripods etc. It will save you time, money and effort.

Who needs a Lightcase?

The list of products you can photograph is endless but we think it would be especially useful for makers of jewellery, fashion accessories, ceramics, books, cards, toys etc... Or perhaps you have an Ebay shop selling vintage memorabilia or small collectibles... Just about anyone making and selling unique smaller objects should have a Lightcase… You can even use it to scan photos and documents and do stop-frame animation. There are so many great apps out there for image processing, animation and photographic effects, creating images with the Lightcase is a lot of fun.

Design and Manufacture

We have been developing and testing the Lightcase with designer makers over the past year. It all started out as a simple method to photograph the tiles that I make. Using thick sheets of polypropylene, I made a simple box with a large hole on top so that the SLR camera could sit on a tripod and shoot through the top. This wasn't ideal as light would seep in through the large opening. I put another sheet on top with a small hole this time and placed my iphone on top - this worked remarkably well. When Brenna saw this she saw potential in photographing her own products not only from the top but also through the front using a curved backdrop. With help from a manufacturer we developed a box that could be folded down into a simple wallet for portability using 0.6mm thick polypropylene. The first prototype did not clip together well and had strength issues so we redesigned it with new sides and a different tabs structure. The Lightcase can now be set up in seconds, it looks elegant and is robust enough to carry any smartphone.

Lightcase is made from polypropylene. Polypropylene is made up from carbon and hydrogen, and is manufactured without any dangerous emissions. It can be recycled up to 50 times.

Our manufacturers have produced the prototypes shown in the images. Your funding will go towards the setting up of the die cuts from which the polypropylene case can be manufactured and then the production of the minimum order of 1000 units.

Production takes just 4 - 5 weeks and you will receive the Lightcase flat packed into its neat A4 case with additional backdrops in white, black and frosted and instructions. Having just set it up once you will easily be able to pop it into shape on the go.

Your Pledge

Please help us bring Lightcase to market by pledging your
support today.

With your funding we can get the tooling done for the first production run of the Lightcase and get it out there for you all.

Thanks to Jim Coad for the video and great input into the project & all the wonderful local artists who have invited us into their studios. For links to the artists featured in the video and throughout the campaign please visit the Lightcase facebook page.

Risks and challenges

We have worked hard to minimise any risks both in the manufacture and distribution of the product. We have production set to go both in the UK and Australia which gives us less risk in the manufacturing stage and allows us to minimise postage costs. We have built in extra time for the manufacture to ensure that we can deliver on time.

Kickstarter is not a store.

Pledge £22 or more
About $28

The Lightcase Early Bird.
£22 / US $36 / AUS $39
Includes delivery worldwide.
First 200 backers get a Lightcase at this special discounted price (recommended retail price is £35).
Be the first to get a Lightcase